Wine Night

Tonight, we had our wine tasting dinner. The neighbors, one by one, ended up with a cold and couldn’t make it at all, though they still made and dropped off the planned wonderful salad. My sister-in-law was just relent not feeling up to getting out. But I managed to get my mom to come, after all, so it was still a small party of sorts with her, my brother, my man, and me. My mom and I definitely had to start spitting after a while, as, even just tasting a single small sip or two adds up like crazy when you’re tasting 18 different wines and Proseccos. And that’s excluding the five we didn’t even open. Nonetheless, we ended up having a great time testing and comparing them all together. And it was quite helpful to have two other palates and opinions to contribute to the considerations.

In the end, it seems we have selected our wines. Just need to go get them all tomorrow. Supposedly, we are doing something like 70 or 76 bottles of wine. While that is a lot, we are getting most of it at Costco, which makes they group all returnable, so long as they’re unopened. And that is a wonderful thing. Thank you, Costco. Well, same deal with the liquor store attached to Costco. Same policy and great pricing, too. Only the Prosecco we preferred seems to be cheaper at Total Wine than at Costco.

Whatever the case for all of it, I really hope folks enjoy the wines we picked. My man has an understanding of wines – because apparently you can’t not when you spend several years living in the smack middle of wine country in California, surrounded by vineyards 24/7 – and he seemed happy with the selections we made. They aren’t awesome wines, no. But they are decent wines. And they are wines that we can afford. And those two are what really matters for it all.

So, thank you, God, for this lovely evening together. Keep us all safe, please, and grant us nourishing sleep tonight. In your name, I pray. Amen.

Post-a-day 2024

Wasted

I wonder what it is that has people do the whole ‘hard core party scene’, filled with drinking, sometimes marijuana, and even the occasional illegal drugs.

Is there something we are seeking, and we search in the self-losing experience of extreme alcohol consumption?

Is there something that feels inadequate, but seems to be fulfilled when under the influence of increasingly strong effects of alcohol?

Are we afraid of or hating something in our lives, and we avoid the thoughts of it through alcohol’s removal of clear thinking?

Are we full of worries, and the alcohol pushes them out of our mind so well, we keep drinking more and more, until the law of diminishing return has been ignored so long that we hardly even function anymore?

Is it something else entirely?

I had a brief time of drinking in certain settings as a sort of camaraderie, or a group participation activity… sometimes even as group participation with ‘the cool kids’.

(I say ‘the cool kids’, but am definitely talking about adults… I wasn’t into law-breaking when I was under 21, and I definitely am not now.)

However, it didn’t last very long.

The worst of it, which was really only a matter of being tipsy in certain group drinking settings, not even drunk, was when I was very much hating something going on within that group setting, and I kind of wanted to avoid it while, at the same time, getting to be one of ‘the cool kids’.

(I did have a wonderful time of regular alcohol consumption at one point in life, and I believe the traditional German (and European) attitudes toward alcohol could prove quite helpful to the US… Biergarten evening drinking in summer in Germany is wonderful… but I didn’t even always drink then.

Anyway, the reason I was mentioning the Biergarten is that I do have positive memories and associations with alcohol… I just don’t much care for it.

I can have it, sure, but I wouldn’t be in the least bit concerned if I never had it again in my life.)

I’ve never understood what drives people to the degrees of drunkenness at which they are not functioning human beings, but merely stumbling babies all over again, twenty-plus years after the original state of babyhood…, but I have wondered much about what drives them to such a point in alcohol consumption.

And I’ve wondered, too, about if there is something comparable for me and my life… I haven’t come up with anything, but I haven’t looked too deeply into that specific piece of the idea.

We even call it being “wasted”…, yet do we consider that it could be a small piece of life that we have, indeed, wasted by being in such a state?

Just a thought, but it’s getting to me tonight…

Anyway… happy life, happy night

Post-a-day 2019

Twenties to remember

As we discuss the concept of drinking alcohol, he says, “[…] What else do you do in your twenties?”

The irony of the statement misses neither of us, as we simultaneously recall that neither of us spent our own twenties drinking alcohol.

😛

I mean, it isn’t that I’m necessarily opposed to the drinking of alcohol, even for myself… I just kind of don’t do it… especially if I am going to be driving, because that, to me, requires a 0.0%.

My friends never mind it, of course, because this has made me a natural and willing designated driver, ever since my first year of college. 😛

Post-a-day 2018